We've already learned that the Ainsworth saloon came into the world in 1899, built by Ed Sauter and first christened Sauter's Place; and that Ed sold it early in 1904 to Claus Ziegler, a former Hobart saloonkeeper.

Claus ran the saloon for a little more than a year and a half. Then it seems he sold it: the Hobart Gazette of September 22, 1905, carried a notice of application for a liquor license, describing the former Sauter's Place and signed by W.N. Wagoner (whose true Christian name remains a mystery to me).

The licensing process didn't go smoothly for W.N. Early in October the Lake County commissioners denied his application due to a remonstrance filed by that quietly respectable Ainsworth farmer, Cyrus E. Smith, "et al."

Most of what I know about the Indiana remonstrance law comes from Judge Woodfin Robinson, whose Powers and Duties of County and Township Officers in the State of Indiana, published in 1900, summarizes the then current statute and case law concerning liquor licenses. The remonstrance law dated back at least to 1894. It granted to any voter in the township in which a particular applicant wished to sell liquor the right to file a formal objection to the granting or renewal of that applicant's license on account of his "immorality or other unfitness." (And it was always "his" — women could not hold liquor licenses.)

What constituted "immorality or other unfitness"? The statute specified only the "habit of becoming intoxicated," but subsequent case law expanded the potential grounds for remonstrance, so long as the remonstrant could prove specific acts of immorality — not just allege a generally immoral character. Courts had sustained the decisions of county commissioners to deny a license based on any one of the following facts:
♦ The applicant frequented places where gambling was permitted.♦ Drunken men often congregated in front of the applicant's saloon.♦ Drunken men had been seen going in and out of the applicant's saloon. ♦ The applicant had allowed minors to use pool tables in his saloon.♦ The applicant had gambled at dice with minors.

But the county board was not obligated to deny a license in the face of such facts, nor to grant a license in their absence — it was a case-by-case, county-by-county decision. "No standard of morals is or can be fixed by law," said Judge Robinson.

I wish I knew what exactly Cyrus et al. had against W.N., but unfortunately the Gazette didn't report the particulars. And ultimately Cyrus lost; in November 1905 the county commissioners reversed themselves and granted W.N. his license.

After all that trouble, he ran the Ainsworth saloon for only a few months. In March 1906, the Gazette reported that Claus Ziegler had bought the saloon back. (W.N. moved to Hobart and took over management of the Kuschinsk saloon.)

Once again a year and a half was about Claus' limit. In September or October 1907, he sold the saloon to William F. Wollenberg. (Claus moved to a small farm north of Hobart; if he farmed, it wasn't for very long — by early 1909 he had hired on to run Hugo Zobjeck's saloon in Hobart.)

William had been farming rented land near Merrillville when he decided to quit farming and go into the saloon business. He moved his family to Ainsworth, where the 1910 census finds them living, probably, in the saloon building — William and his wife, Adelphine, and their children, Myrtle, William Jr., and Edward.

The saloon business suited William better than farming, it seems: I've gotten through 1912 in the microfilm, and he is still happily keeping the Ainsworth saloon, and getting his license renewed year after year with no recorded opposition from Cyrus Smith or anyone else.

I just got this postcard from eBay. It is postmarked October 10, 1931. I've never been on the Indian Ridge golf course and I wouldn't have the faintest idea what part of it this photo shows. It doesn't look like any part that you can see driving past on State Road 51.

Two observations: (1) That bridge is a work of art. (2) You can see "Indian Ridge" spelled out against the ridge in the background.

Edward D. Scroggins had married Daisy Chester sometime between 1900 and 1907 (probably closer to the latter), and throughout their short marriage, they wandered. They lived in Minnesota for nearly a year, and then — interspersed with visits to her sister Carrie Raschka in Ainsworth — briefly in La Moille and then Steward, Illinois (where their first daughter was born); and when Daisy returned to say farewell to her dying father, she came from Flint, Michigan.

But after Daisy's untimely death in 1910, E.D. (as he preferred to be called) ceased his wandering. He and his two little daughters moved in with his mother-in-law, the newly widowed Mary Chester, and there they stayed. No doubt the extended Chester family gave E.D. much-needed help in caring for his little girls, the younger being only a few months old.

I don't know what E.D.'s usual line of work was. While at Steward, Illinois, he had worked as an operator with the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy line, and he may have continued railroad work in Flint, Michigan, possibly even with the Grand Trunk Railroad. By 1920, he would be an electrician at a steel mill. When he first came to live in Ainsworth, I expect he worked on the Chester farm. But within a year of his coming here, he had found a novel way to earn money — as an auto liveryman.

In March of 1911, he purchased a Badger touring car through the Dorman Brothers agency. He and Carlisle Dorman traveled to the Badger factory at Columbus, Wisconsin, to fetch the car, and drove it back.

His brothers-in-law must have been impressed with E.D.'s Badger: in June 1911 John bought one for himself; the following month Charles bought one too, and E.D. helped him drive it home. E.D. maintained friendly relations with all of his in-laws. The Ainsworth news columns often reported his outings with one Chester or another — a trip to Chicago with Mary; a drive with John to Elgin, Illinois, to watch the auto races; a visit to Knox, Indiana, for the wedding of Carrie and William Raschka's daughter, Minnie.

In August 1911, he rented his 80 acres of the Henry Chester farmland (which may have come to him through Daisy) to another Ainsworth farmer, thus gaining a second source of income.

At some point amid all these activities, he met Bertha Witt. She was a daughter of the John Witt whose cow had needed avenging in one of the shotgun stories. A few years earlier, her older brother, John Jr., married Louise Sievert, who had lived along the county line mid-way between Hobart and Ainsworth, and in 1908, the young couple moved onto a rented farm south of Ainsworth. By 1910, Bertha was living there in her brother's household, describing herself to the census enumerator as a servant.

Not a word ever made it into the social columns of Bertha and E.D. even being in each other's company. In fact, they were well apart during January 1912, as E.D. went on a long trip to Kansas to visit his brother there, and Bertha moved back in with her parents to recuperate from a bad burn she had suffered while working in the kitchen in her brother's house.

But she did recover; E.D. did come back; and at the end of May 1912 came the sudden announcement that the two of them had married. The wedding took place in her parents' home west of Hobart.

And that's all I know thus far. The 1920 census finds E.D. and Bertha living in Hobart, with their six-year-old son, Edward, and four-month-old daughter, Mabel. And E.D.'s daughters by Daisy were living in a Chicago rooming-house with their grandmother, Mary Chester McDaniel, and their step-grandfather John. But that's seven years' worth of microfilm away.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Jack Sanders tells us that this flower's "common and scientific names are among the most unusual and sentimental."

The common name, Black-eyed Susan, comes from a ballad written by John Gay around 1720 (lyrics and tune here).

The scientific name, Rudbeckia hirta, commemorates two Swedish botanists, Olaus Rudbeck, Sr. and Jr. They were professors of botany at the University of Upsala when Carl von Linne went there in the 1720s to study medicine, and Olaus Jr. became Carl's mentor and friend. Carl is better known to us now as Linnaeus, who developed the binomial system of naming all life forms by genus and species, and who immortalized the Rudbeck name as a genus of flowers.

Hirta is Latin for "hairy." That description does not apply to the Rudbecks, but to the stalk and leaves of the Black-eyed Susan.

In a typewritten manuscript (a typescript?) contained in the "Hobart Neighborhoods" file at the Hobart Historical Society Museum, Dorothy Ballantyne tells us that Joryville was the area east of Lincoln Street and south of the Egin, Joliet & Eastern tracks (now the walking/bike path).

A little map on the "Hobart As It Was" exhibit shows the original Joryville bounded on the north by Eighth Street, on the east by Linda Street, on the south by Ninth Street, and on the west by Lincoln Street — but that was the late-19th-century version; I don't doubt that the name "Joryville" would eventually be applied to a slightly expanded area.

Here's a couple of views from Joryville roughly circa 1910.

(Click to enlarge)Images courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

It was evidently a charming neighborhood then, and so it remains to this day — full of interesting old houses and shaded by tall old trees.

I suppose if I wanted to work hard at it, I could figure out where these shots were taken and do a then-and-now thing, but I don't feel like working hard at anything at the moment.

I came across the above typewritten list in the docket book of A.B. Wyant, who was a Hobart Township justice of the peace in the late 1930s-early 1940s. In the various stories in this blog, when I say someone had to pay a fine plus costs, the latter would include some of this stuff.

Continuing on the topic of my vast ignorance, I have to admit that before I started this research, I never thought of a justice of the peace as doing anything but marrying people who didn't want a church ceremony. So it came as a surprise to me, as I began reading the old newspapers, that when someone thought someone else has wronged him or her, a justice of the peace would get involved.

From an 1878 book entitled The Statutes of the State of Indiana I find that justices of the peace had jurisdiction over actions in contract or tort where the debt or damage claimed was less than $100 (or $200 in cases of concurrent jurisdiction; and a defendant could confess judgment up to $300). Excepted from their jurisdiction were cases involving slander, malicious prosecution, land ownership, and where any party was related to the justice of the peace by blood or marriage. Matters not falling under a J.P.'s jurisdiction would go to the county circuit court.

(I didn't find in the 1878 book, nor am I otherwise at all clear, how and to what extent J.P.s got involved in criminal matters, so I'm not going to try to deal with that now.)

The J.P.'s court was a civil court on a small scale, somewhat like our small-claims courts except that parties could be represented by attorneys if they so chose. Someone would show up in the J.P.'s office and, under oath, would tell the J.P. how he believed the other party had wronged him. If the J.P. thought the alleged facts constituted a legal case, he would issue a summons, which he would give to a constable to serve upon the other party, either by reading it to him or by leaving a copy with him. The summons would tell the other party when to show up in the J.P.'s court for the case to be heard. (If the case involved a debtor who appeared to be about to flee, the J.P. could order his arrest.) The J.P. also had the power to subpoena witnesses.

The J.P. himself would try the case, unless either party requested a jury trial, in which case the J.P. would preside over the jury trial.

In the same docket book, I found what was probably a typical summons:1940 Summons(Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.)

And that's our legal lecture for today. Hope you enjoyed this edition of "The Blogger's Court."

This research project has taught me that I possess a hitherto-unsuspected reservoir of ignorance. For example, I've heard the derisive expression "dog and pony show" all my life without ever knowing that there once existed a form of entertainment that would earnestly advertise itself as a dog and pony show.

Freed's Dog and Pony Show went off much better than Sullivan's Wild West Show the previous year. Attendance was high, according to the Hobart News, and the performance well received. And there was no brawling in the street afterwards.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Found in the low ground beside the Grand Trunk tracks. Lawrence Newcomb says of this plant, "All parts are deadly poisonous to taste." That makes me want to go out there and eat some of it, just to see whether I drop dead or not.

And it's a member of the Parsley family! I'll bet it doesn't get invited to family reunions.

A couple more shots, just so you know which plant to skip when you're out by the railroad tracks gathering your lunch. Here's the whole plant:

The Hobart News of December 26, 1912, carried this tantalizing tidbit:

Fred Yeager is erecting an up-to-date bungalow on his farm east of Ainsworth. Looks as though there was something doing.

Fred had the money to pay for a nice little bungalow, after taking Jerome Chester to the cleaners. Was he perhaps trying to entice Anna to come back — she who had so objected to his one-room log cabin?

Actually I have no idea where Anna was at this point; she is never mentioned. Jerome was then living in Chicago, as was sometimes casually mentioned in minor new items, e.g., in July 1912: "Mr. Jerome Chester of Chicago was a Hobart business caller on Friday." It's possible Jerome and Anna were still shacking up there.

December 1912 saw the weddings of two young couples from the Ainsworth area. On December 21, Martha Klemm married Louis Weiler; and on the 26th, Bertha Nolte married Claude Campbell.

The first made a great splash.

The second barely got mentioned.

That's it for poor Birdie Nolte. She didn't get a word in the Gazette or anywhere else that I've found. Henry's only surviving daughter! — I said these people were quiet, but on such an occasion, you'd think they could stand to make a bit more noise.

By the way, the "Klenn" in the first article is a misprint. And Martha was the sister of Emma Klemm, who had married John Chester in 1905.

The Hobart News of January 23, 1913, reprinted an item from the Crown Point News, which was meant as an anecdote about current prices versus prices of 30 years previously, but its interest for me was that its pricing information came from the records of one Williams Woods, who allegedly "kept a store at Ainsworth about 30 years ago." Subtracting 30 years from 1913 would put us in the early 1880s.

A couple of things I'd like to know: whether "Woods" is a mistake for "Wood," i.e., the William H. Wood who later kept a store in Deepriver; and whether this early store was the same store later operated by W.O. Halsted and then William Raschka.

Another tidbit I hope to learn more about when I start on the 19th-century newspapers.

I don't know when that's going to happen. There's going to come a point, and I think it's going to be shortly after World War II, when everything going on in Ainsworth is going to be too depressingly modern to interest me. When I reach that point, I'll get on the WABAC machine and go read all those microfilms I should have started with, and how odd it will be, where I've seen people grow old and die, to find them young and healthy again, and where I've seen them come to bad ends, to find them in all unsuspecting innocence.

After the local dairy farmers' initial difficulties in organizing in 1901-2, and aside from the occasional smallpox scare, their business seems to have gone along quietly for several years, with no more than ordinary troubles. Then in the summer of 1908, the progressive spirit of the times coupled with advances in medical understanding of the spread of disease to result in the passage of laws in Chicago and Indiana that had local farmers in an uproar.

Early that summer, the City Council of Chicago passed an ordinance, to take effect on January 1, 1909, that required milk sold in Chicago to come from dairy farms meeting certain standards of construction and operation; it also required that any milk sold, if sold unpasteurized, must come from cows that had been tested and found free of tuberculosis. And in July, the State of Indiana made it illegal to sell milk from diseased cows.

Local farmers had to take the Chicago ordinance as seriously as any Indiana law, since Chicago was their biggest market. And the Chicago Board of Health was sending agents to inspect northwest Indiana dairy farms and report on conditions they found. In anticipation of the effective date of the ordinance, many farmers started making the required improvements to their facilities, such as detaching cow stables from horse barns and whitewashing them, as well as to their procedures, such as cleaning the stable and thoroughly washing the cows' udders half an hour before each milking. All of this involved added time and expense for the farmers.

The tuberculin testing threatened further financial loss. The Gazette was initially under the impression that until January 1 cattle testing positive for tuberculosis could still be shipped to Chicago for slaughter; but once the ordinance went into effect, "[t]he milk shipper or farmer owning cattle thus condemned must stand the loss. He cannot sell but must kill and bury."

Local farmers held a meeting in Ainsworth on Saturday, October 3, to discuss their dilemma. Faced with real and potential costs, they thought they should be compensated by a higher price for milk; but the milk dealers who sold to small retailers were insisting that they could not sell milk if the price were raised.

A second meeting at the Ainsworth schoolhouse on the evening of October 10 brought farmers in from miles around, about 250 of them. (How that little schoolhouse could hold 250 agitated people, I do not know — maybe they threw open the windows and doors so those who couldn't get in could hear what was going on, or maybe they all just met outside the school, under the starry skies.) Among the speakers at this meeting was John F. Dorman, who had once been "connected with the Health Department in Chicago" and whose brother, Charles, was on the Chicago police force.

The farmers decided that to protect their interests they had to form an organization to lobby the state government, primarily for compensation for cattle condemned by the tuberculin test. They began by electing officers: John Dorman, President; Calvin Shearer, Secretary; and Morgan Blachly, Treasurer. An Executive Committee, consisting of John Dorman, John Demmon and Cyrus E. Smith, was appointed to begin drawing up the organization's by-laws and drafting the desired legislation. The farmers chose Dr. Mike O'Hearn as the veterinarian who would inspect dairy cattle, and decided to demand $1.45 per can as their new minimum price for milk.

The next meeting, on October 16, drew some 300 farmers to Ainsworth. Several Chicago milk dealers addressed the assemblage. They pointed out that small milk dealers could not pay the $1.45-per-can price because the selling price for milk in Chicago was set by the large dealers; and if the small dealers were forced out of business, the dairy farmers would have to contend with the large dealers, effectively a monopoly.

John Green spoke up: he had tried to ship two cows to a Chicago slaughterhouse, but they were rejected by Illinois authorities as tubercular, and he received for them only the price of their hides. This seemed to negate the belief that tubercular cows could be sold in Chicago for meat before the new ordinance went into effect. (Under Indiana law at the time, the majority of cattle found to be infected with tuberculosis could be kept for breeding or sold for meat, subject to federal regulations on meat inspection; but cattle "showing advanced or generalized disease" were condemned, with the owner receiving only the value of the hide.)

State Senator Arthur J. Bowser attended this meeting. He spoke briefly, asking the farmers to let him know what sort of legislation they wanted him to pursue.

November came, and the milk shippers union's Milk Price Committee — which now consisted of equal numbers of milk shippers and dealers — failed for the first time in years to reach an agreement on price. Their meeting disbanded in frustration. The Richmond-Smith Co., as agents for most of the local shippers, decided to fulfill its contracts at the market prices, which ranged between $.05 and $.15 below what the farmers were asking.

As the weeks went by, farmers continued making improvements to their facilities, rebuilding sheds and barns, putting in new floors and otherwise cleaning up. And they began to have their herds tested for tuberculosis.

At a meeting in Ainsworth in mid-November, the farmers learned that the state had finally appropriated funds to help pay for the testing, the cost of which had previously come straight from their own pockets. The farmers now decided to accept the services of the state veterinarian, A.W. Bitting, and his assistants in administering the tuberculin test. (But Dr. Bitting advised them that the state funding was inadequate, and asked the farmers to chip in $.20 for each cow to be tested.) At this meeting, the farmers decided to have petitions printed up for presentation to the legislature in January, seeking reimbursement for condemned cattle.

As the testing of local dairy herds progressed, some surprising results emerged. For instance, of the 18 milch cows belonging to Hubert Bullock, 17 were found infected — and his herd had long been thought one of the finest in the area. In the face of such results, some farmers began to doubt the accuracy of the test; others declared they meant to quit dairy farming altogether.

December brought more testing and more bad news. Charles Ols had 12 out of 30 cows rejected; Ben Bodamer's little herd of eight lost two. Other farmers were luckier: George Lutz lost only one out of 14, John Gruel only 3 out of 41, and all of John Sievert's cows passed the test.

The Gazette urged all farmers to sign the petitions for passage of a compensation law.

News came from Crown Point that two local veterinarians who conducted a postmortem on a couple of cattle rejected by state testers had found both animals healthy and free of disease. Some farmers became so distrustful of the state testers that they preferred to hire private veterinarians instead, thought the cost was five times as much.

The new year came, and Chicago's new ordinance went into effect. The Gazette quoted a prominent New York pasteurization advocate, who maintained that "[a]ll other measures for municipal advance fade into insignificance in comparison" with the new law. However, it quickly became apparent that the new law had "not been put in full operation" just yet.

Around Ainsworth, cattle testing continued, and so did the losses. Although five farmers escaped without a single cow condemned, and several others — including James Chester, Robert Rossow, Henry Nolte and Jake Hallern — lost only one or two, Henry Chester lost nearly his entire herd: 45 out of 50 condemned, and several more "suspicious."

Week after week, the dairymen met at Ainsworth. On January 11, owners of some 1,500 cattle showed up, along with representatives of the Chicago milk dealers union, and attorney Joseph H. Conroy of Hammond, whose firm represented the dairy farmers. News had reached the area that some Chicago wholesale milk dealers were buying up tubercular cows, pasteurizing the milk they got from them and selling it in competition with milk from the tested and healthy herds. The local farmers felt that this was unfair competition, and passed a resolution calling on Chicago authorities to repeal all laws "now in force providing for the pasteurization of milk." Discussion continued on the matter of state legislation to compensate farmers for condemned cattle. A "legislation and finance" committee was selected to continue the lobbying work, consisting of John Dorman, John Gruel, Harve Carey, Joseph Schillo, William Springman, Henry Reimer and Calvin Shearer.

On February 12 the Gazette announced that the proposed tuberculosis-testing compensation bill had been introduced in the Indiana legislature. And a petition signed by more than 500 dairymen, urging passage of the bill, had been sent to Senator Bowser.

That same day, the State Veterinarian, Dr. Bitting, held a public postmortem on three cattle that had tested positive for tuberculosis. This demonstration took place on Michael Foreman's farm just west of Ainsworth. The first cow to be slaughtered and autopsied had come from a Wheeler farmer's herd, and outwardly had appeared healthy, but Dr. Bitting's dissection soon turned up evidence of disease: a pus-filled gland in the neck. Another cow showed evidence of disease in the liver, among other places. The most striking case was a cow belonging to Hubert Bullock, which had appeared sickly even before testing. "The examination showed she was completely diseased," the Gazette reported, "and the dissecting was simply nauseating. She was the limit." The demonstration seemed to have achieved its intended effect: persuading the farmers of the reliability of the tuberculin test and the reality of disease among their cows.

Early in February, five local farmers — John Gruel, Harve Carey, Z.H. Fifield, Calvin Shearer and Joseph Schillo — left for Indianapolis to lobby legislators for passage of the compensation law. They appeared twice before a House committee, to speak first on their own proposed bill and then on the bill drafted by Dr. Bitting. The committee combined the two to create a compromise bill, which was approved by the House the following day. The farmer-lobbyists returned home optimistic.

The Gazette of February 26 printed the text of the proposed "tuberculin test bill," which had now become House Bill No. 345. Its provisions included compensation to the owner of any tubercular cow that was condemned, the amount to be determined by agreement of the state and the owner, or if the value exceeded $25 and they could not agree, then by three independent appraisers. An otherwise healthy animal that reacted to the tuberculin test could be kept for breeding purposes, and for dairy purposes if its milk was pasteurized before sale, but the state had the power to condemn any animal "showing physical evidence of tuberculosis."

The Indiana House of Representatives passed the tuberculin test bill on February 24; the Senate passed it on March 5; and after a few days' hesitation and some intensive lobbying by Rep. Edward Wickey, the newly elected Governor Thomas R. Marshall signed it into law.

Its passage had not been an easy victory, not the least because of infighting among farmers. One of the attorneys for the milk shippers explained:

We had a very hard fight in the State legislature, especially in the House of Representatives, as the dairymen from different parts of the state differed as to what the law should be, consequently, we had the Ft. Wayne Dairymen and the Evansville Dairymen fighting us all the time while the bill was in the House … [but] when it reached the Senate I succeeded in getting the dairymen all over the state to thinking the same way, and for that reason … we didn't have much trouble in getting the bill through the Senate."

But it was an important victory, said the Gazette, "especially to those farmers of Ross township where the project started," because it demonstrated what the dairymen could do when they worked together.

At a celebratory meeting in Ainsworth on March 13, the officers of the dairymen's association asked for donations to help defray the $300 in expenses they had incurred in securing the passage of the bill.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

That is one boring wildflower. The only slightly interesting thing about it is a comment in Wikipedia that these flowers are "also named the Grave Flower or Flower of the Dead in parts of England as they are seen often growing on gravesites and around tombstones."

Another problem facing dairy farmers around here in the early 1900s was the prevalence of disease and its link to milk. Apparently milk was not then routinely pasteurized, nor were people routinely vaccinated.

In the autumn of 1904, smallpox broke out in Merrillville. The usual method of handling such outbreaks was quarantine, and it was duly imposed. By October 21 the Ainsworth school had to close: its teacher, Silas Zuvers, was confined to Merrillville by the quarantine, and no substitute was available. Meanwhile, Ainsworth-area people hurried to get vaccinated.

The Ainsworth school remained closed for a couple of weeks, until November 7, when Mr. Zuvers was allowed to return to his teaching duties.

Either the news of the outbreak traveled slowly, or Chicago's Board of Health was slow to respond. Not until November 17 did the Board issue orders prohibiting the shipping of milk from the Grand Trunk's Lottaville and Turkey Creek stations.

The next day a Chicago health officer showed up in Ainsworth, nosing around for smallpox and talking of extending the boycott to the Ainsworth depot. Hugh Dotzer was able to talk him out of it. ("No smallpox in Ainsworth," said the Gazette's correspondent, "but plenty of sore arms.")

In response to the boycott, a number of Merrillville dairy farmers went to Chicago to appear before the Board of Health. Somehow — perhaps by convincing the Board that the quarantine had been effective and the outbreak had already run its course — they got the Board to lift its orders and allow the shipment of milk from Merrillville again. The Gazette commented: "The order stopped about 120 cans and would have been bad for the farmers shipping milk if the boycott had been continued."

By December 2, the Ainsworth correspondent said he'd been to Merrillville and found "all smallpox cases cured."

Reinhart Doepping owned a farm south of Deepriver. January 1909 found him working in Henry Nolte's woods north and east of present-day Big Maple Lake. He was cutting and hauling trees — with Henry's permission, so that was all well and good; but in hauling the felled trees out to the road, he had to pass through Louis Wojahn's little ten-acre parcel, and on that wooded parcel he spotted a couple of fine trees that he decided he simply couldn't live without. In fact, he coveted his neighbor's ash, and his walnut. And he cut them down and hauled them away.

Louis noticed the two trees missing from among all the others. He may have already known about Reinhart's logging on the Nolte land, or he soon found out; but Reinhart was the natural suspect.

Louis went to Crown Point to see a Deputy Prosecutor, M.J. Smith. So well did he make his case that he was able to come back to Ainsworth with a deputy sheriff and a search warrant.

The Gazette explained the cracking of the case thus:

At the Doepping home they found two black walnut logs, cut from the identified tree, and at the Weiler sawmill they found the other one and the ash tree.

"Cut from the identified tree"? All I can say is, wow, did these people know their trees, or what?

Of course Louis pursued the matter in court. Reinhart pled guilty and ended up having to pay Louis $50, as well as $17 in costs. I don't know whether he was allowed to keep the wood.

I also don't know why I thought this story was fit to be included in this blog.

Monday, June 14, 2010

I'm taking a short vacation to St. Louis courtesy of the Hobart Gazette of November 25, 1904. (And in case anyone doesn't know, a mustard poultice or plaster was a common treatment for a variety of ailments in times past.)

The Hebron News relates the following tale about a Valpo couple who attended the World's fair, stopping at one of the best hotels in St. Louis: About 2 a.m. the husband was seized suddenly with severe stomach cramps and was almost frantic. His wife was very frightened, but knew that something must be done quickly, so without waiting to put on clothing started down stairs on the jump with naught on but her "nighty". Running into the dining room she saw a mustard cruet on the table. Emptying the contents into her handkerchief she started upstairs on the run, and entered the first door she came to. Here she saw a man lying on the bed, who in the dim duskiness she mistook for her husband and gently tucking up his lingerie slapped the poultice on his abdomen. The man let out a howl, and, sitting up, quickly shouted in angry tones: "Woman, what in hell are you doing?" There was a shriek, a patter of unshod feet on the hall floor, and frightened half to death the poor wife found her room and suffering husband. She told him her troubles and it tickled him so that his cramps took a change of venue.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Another wartime public timetable. This one acknowledges the existence of Ainsworth, but doesn't show any trains stopping there — obviously, because they wouldn't want that vital information to fall into enemy hands. Any good American would already know when the train stopped at Ainsworth. And we'd learned a thing or two about keeping secrets since World War I.

(Click on images to enlarge)Top image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Looking north on Center Street from the Nickel Plate tracks. In the foreground at left is the original Trinity Lutheran Church. If I understand the chronology correctly (per Hobart's Historic Buildings by Elin B. Christianson), at the time of the top image (roughly 1900-10), that building was being used as the Trinity Lutheran School, the congregation having moved into the new church at Second and Main.

Here's another view in approximately the same location, and roughly the same time period — but taken in the summertime, when all you can see is foliage, and some kids who are not in school.

I've been remiss in not speaking much of the dairy industry. It was part of the livelihood of many families in the Ainsworth area. By 1900, according to the Rev. T.H. Ball, Ainsworth "constituted quite a shipping point for milk." But I don't know much about the topic — either the dairy industry generally in the early 20th century, or its operations in northwest Indiana — and it doesn't help that the newspapers wrote about it for an audience that lived with it daily and thus did not need many things spelled out for them. (It also doesn't help that it's a pretty dry subject, and that's no joke.)

I have found a Gazette article from 1901 that says there were then some 2,800 milk shippers "in this territory." (I'm not sure what "this territory" comprised — northwest Indiana, or Lake County, or the Hobart-Valparaiso area?) "Milk shippers" was the term applied to dairy farmers who shipped milk out for sale. Chicago's burgeoning population was thirsty for milk, and with the numerous railroads across northwest Indiana making it possible to ship this highly perishable product quickly, it's no wonder that many local farmers looked to milk as a cash crop. But they had railroads to deal with, and middlemen in the city who took a fee for finding retailers to buy the product, and of course those retailers also wanted to maximize their own profit, and with all these competing interests, as the Gazette said, "Milk shipping has always been a great problem for the farmers to work out and keep from getting skinned."

In the autumn of 1901, some Chicago milk dealers were working among the area milk shippers to form a union, and by November 1, out of the 2,800 area shippers, 2,000 had signed contracts with them, thus binding themselves to work only with those dealers for the next five years. In return, the shippers were guaranteed a specified price for their milk during that term, the dealers putting up a bond of $25,000 to guarantee payment.

But the Chicago "milk route men" — retailers, I assume — responded by forming their own union and declaring their intention to refuse to buy from the milk dealers involved with the union.

And since the union milk shippers were contractually prohibited to sell to anyone else, they were now in a bind. The Gazette expressed its opinion that in the long run, if they stuck together, they would win out, because the 800 non-union shippers simply could not supply Chicago's demand for milk. For the moment, the local shippers could sell at least some of their product locally. Eventually the Chicago retailers would have to cave. But it would be a nail-biting wait for that to happen.

Silence fell over the subject until the spring of 1902. Then the Gazette reported a "large and enthusiastic meeting" of milk shippers in Hobart, and it appeared that the union had indeed stuck together and was again able to sell milk in Chicago. And unless the terminology had changed, it seems that yet another middleman had inserted itself into the process: the "milk agent," in the form of the Richmond-Smith Co., which addressed the Hobart meeting, offering to deal with the Chicago milk dealers on behalf of the shippers for a fee of one cent per can. The agents would require dealers to post a bond before they could buy any milk, thus virtually guaranteeing the arranged price to the shippers.

The arranged price was determined for the union by a board composed of one representative from each railroad that carried milk. Those representatives were chosen by the union members. The price was set for six months at a time. Thus in April 1902 the Board of Directors of the Milk Shippers Union set the price per 8-gallon can at 75 cents during May and June, 85 cents during July, 90 cents during August, and 95 cents during September and October.

"The milk shippers realize the necessity of a perfect organization," said the Gazette, "and as long as they stick together they can more easily secure their rights, and protect themselves against dishonest milk dealers in the city…. 'In union there is strength.'"

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

(Click on image to enlarge)Advertisement for Edward Rohwedder's livery service, from the Hobart News of July 11, 1912.

On April 19, 1912, a couple of traveling salesmen, who had come from Cedar Rapids via Chicago, arrived in Hobart. One was a youth of twenty named Harold McCauley; the other an older man known only as J. Moore. They represented manufacturers of various items, including different types of polish and vinegar, and they went about making sales calls on area merchants, with some success.

As might be expected, the young Harold did not stick strictly to business. Good-looking and glib, he made friends easily, and before a week had gone by he was paying particular attention to a Hobart girl (name unknown). He asked her for a date to the Saturday-night dance at Ainsworth scheduled for April 27. She said yes.

But Harold had a problem — he was flat broke. His employer hadn't yet paid him for his Hobart sales orders; on the Thursday before the dance, he wrote home to beg for money, but had not heard back by Saturday. How on earth was he going to hire a rig to take his girl down to Ainsworth? He couldn't pay cash, and since he was such a recent arrival in Hobart, there was no reason why any livery stable would trust him for the fee on credit.

Then he had a brilliant idea: he would forge a check — not to cash it, but simply to show it to a livery stable owner in order to establish his credit. And then when his employer paid him or the money from home arrived, he could pay off the livery stable, and no harm done, right?

Late on Saturday afternoon, Harold went to the post office and there wrote himself a check in the amount of $89, drawn on the First State Bank in Hobart, and signed by "F. Jones, Mdg. Egr. G. H. & E. R.R." — i.e., an engineer for the Gary, Hobart and Eastern Traction Company, which ran the newly established streetcar service between Hobart and Gary.

Harold asked a boy at the post office where he could go to get the check cashed, explaining that he wanted to hire a rig to go to the dance. The boy told him to go to the Gazette office (whether seriously, or suspecting fraud and intending to send the criminal directly into the arms of the newspaper editor, I don't know). Harold didn't take his advice, but someone alerted the editor of the Gazette, who then went to the Rohwedder livery stable, where he found Harold and his girlfriend waiting for their rig.

By offering to cash the check, the editor got Harold to show it to him. He thought it looked bogus. Now Marshal Fred Rose was called in. He thought the check a fake, too, but nonetheless set out looking around town for the check's alleged writer, "F. Jones." After an hour's fruitless search, the Marshal returned to speak to Harold again, only to find that he no longer had the check — it had mysteriously vanished. Harold was invited to spend the night in jail.

On Sunday morning Marshal Rose came across pieces of the check lying in the street. Harold soon broke down and confessed the whole scheme, explaining that while Rose was out looking for "F. Jones," Harold had finally torn up the check and thrown it on the street.

The Marshal called Harold's brother, who lived in Milwaukee. After coming to Hobart Sunday evening, the brother told the Marshal that to his knowledge, Harold "had never done anything criminally wrong, although he had been, like many boys of today, a little wild, being the youngest of the family and had never known what 'hard luck' meant."

Harold remained in jail Sunday night.

On Monday, the mail brought him a letter from his mother, containing $20. But, of course, it was too late to do Harold any good. That same day he was released to the custody of his brother, who promised to take him back to Milwaukee and make him behave better in the future.

Monday, June 7, 2010

For a few months in the spring of 1908, after "Sauter's hall" became "Lindborg's hall" — or simply "the hall at Ainsworth" — dances were given there under the management of Charles Hamilton, a Hobart mail-carrier. Then Charles faded from view and Gust Lindborg took over that part of Ainsworth's Saturday-night entertainment.

Henceforward you could count on finding, about once every month (sometimes twice or thrice) the same item in the Ainsworth news column: "A public dance will be given this week Saturday in the hall at Ainsworth. Good music will be furnished. The dancing public is invited."

Sometimes the dance would be a masquerade ball, with tickets at 75 cents per couples and prizes awarded for the handsomest costume and for the most comical. Once it was a "married people's" dance.

In October 1911, Gust started running separate dance advertisements in the Hobart News:

(Click on image to enlarge)

These ads appeared only in the News, as if Gust believed that paper to be the favorite of the partying types. After a few weeks, he discontinued the ads. They probably were not necessary to attract people; the brief mentions in the social columns were enough. And now and then the papers carried reports of good attendance at a dance that Gust had not even bothered to advertise. So popular were the Ainsworth dances that Hobartites often took the mile-long jaunt south to attend them.

Gust'spromise, in the ad above, to maintain "good order" was probably inspired by previous incidents. In February 1909, for example, a fight broke out at one of those Saturday-night dances between two locals, Ed Maybaum and Louis Weiler. (They settled the matter in court the next week, with Ed, who started the fight, assessed about $20 in fines and costs.) An August 1910 item in the Ainsworth new column hinted at further trouble: "What was the fight about Saturday evening?"

I have the impression that Ainsworth could sometimes be a bit rough on weekends, and that's just from the dust-ups that got reported; I expect there were others that didn't. The incidents might be treated with wry humor — some sort of fracas in January 1905 was reported thus: "Ainsworth ranks first in the line of pugilists as it went to show Saturday evening. Anyone can get particulars by asking Ed. Mankey"; a December 1907 incident came out as: "A little shooting affair is reported to have taken place Sunday morning at Ainsworth but no one was hurt." In October 1906, as we've mentioned already, a brutal Saturday-night fight between George Young and Duffy DeFrance had the latter facing a charge of murder. My guess is that fights, when they occurred, tended to start either at the dance hall or just around the corner at the saloon.

And Gust Lindborg, while fundamentally kind-hearted, was a serious man, sometimes to the point of sternness, and definitely not the type to be amused by such antics. So I think it suited his inclination as well as his business sense to maintain order at his dances.

However, his good intentions and best efforts could not always prevail against liquored-up rowdiness, as in July 1912, when, according to the Gazette:

A disgraceful fight occurred last Saturday evening in the dance hall at Ainsworth and one of the drunken whelps struck a Hobart girl and felled her to the floor, according to a report. Boy's [sic] who can't behave themselves in public should not be permitted to attend a dance and should be made to suffer for any wrong done. A young man, whether drunk or sober, who strikes a girl with his fist should be made to pay dearly for the act.

How the "drunken whelp" in question was made to pay for his act was not reported. I can only imagine what Gust had to say about it all.

The dance hall was only a side business, of course, and Gust's main business, the blacksmith shop, was humming along. Starting in 1911, he began running a weekly advertisement in the Gazette (and only in the Gazette — apparently he thought the serious, businesslike people preferred that paper to the News):

(Click on image to enlarge)

This ad ran on the same page with those of Hobart's doctors, lawyers and architects, Main Street livery stables, and a competing blacksmith, August Mueller.

The quality of Gust's blacksmithing and machinery-repair skills was such that by 1910 Trustee Calvin Shearer entrusted to him repair work on Ross Township's school buses.

In July 1911 the two men made a trip to the Studebaker Company in South Bend, where Calvin purchased a new bus for the township, with Gust handling the sale. The newspaper report does not specify whether this bus was horse-drawn or motorized. The Studebaker Company had begun manufacturing gasoline-powered vehicles in 1904, and by 1912 it was producing handsome automotive school buses like this:

(Click on image to enlargeImage credit: Wikimedia Commons.

But whether the rural Ross Township school system could afford such a high-end machine is another question.

That same month Gust sold a horse-drawn wagon to a neighbor, William Foreman.

By now Gust and Anna had two young children: Mildred, born 1906, and Franklin, born 1909. The young family still found time to visit with relatives and friends in Chicago. Anna had family in south Chicago, possibly including Andrew and Agnes Palm, who show up there in the 1910 census;* the Lindborgs also visited the family of William Kimball, whose wife, Elma, was a recent immigrant from Sweden. Gust had a relative in Chicago named Emil Lindborg, who visited Ainsworth at least once. On occasion the Lindborgs drove out to Miller to visit friends there.

In August of 1911 Anna suffered serious health problems. She entered a hospital in Chicago, where on August 22 she underwent an operation for what the newspaper described as "liver trouble." She remained hospitalized until mid-September, and shortly after returning home she became so ill that a doctor had to be called. She recovered, apparently, since by early December the Lindborgs were out and about again, visiting friends. No more was heard of Anna's being sick until March 1912, and then she seems to have suffered only a brief illness.

I said in my previous entry about the Lindborgs that I wasn't sure where they lived when they first came here — and now I'm even less sure, for I now know that the little house at 6310 Ainsworth did not arrive until June of 1912, when the Gazette reported:

Gust Lindborg who bought the old Sullivan schoolhouse has moved it to the side of his dance hall and carpenters are remodeling it for a cottage.

The name of the school may indicate that it had been built on land belonging to Patrick and Sarah Sullivan; they had lived in Lake County since 1860, and by 1891 owned 100 acres southwest of Ainsworth and bordering on present-day Route 30. Evidently the old schoolhouse was no longer sufficient, for a new Sullivan school was being built — brick, two-roomed, with a basement. So the little frame schoolhouse was picked up and moved to the heart of Ainsworth, where it started its new life as the Lindborg home.

[To be continued]
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*[8/2/10 amendment] It was more likely Anna's brother, Peter Palm, and his wife, Hulda. They are harder to find in the 1910 census because the style of the census-taker's handwriting makes their name look like "Palen," which is how the Ancestry.com search engine interprets it.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

It was a Tuesday evening in mid-December, 1911, when alarming reports started coming in to the Lake County sheriff. One was from the Hobart veterinarian, Dr. Mike O'Hearn, who had been traveling along the Joliet road (present-day 73rd Avenue) around 7 p.m. when out of the darkness a stranger in a buggy hailed him. It was only after he had stopped that he noticed the stranger held a gun. The man demanded to know if Mike had a watch, and then peppered him with questions, all the while pointing the gun at him. At the approach of a couple other rigs, the stranger whipped up his horse and moved on, to Mike's great relief. As soon as he could get to a telephone, Mike called in to Sheriff Thomas Grant with a description of the man.

Two similar reports came in that evening of Deep River-area residents being accosted by a man with a gun on the Joliet road.

The December 14 edition of the Hobart News recounted Mike's experience with a sober warning: "Everybody take notice and keep off the roads at night."

The next day, the Gazette cleared up the mystery:

A deputy sheriff from Laporte county who was delivering a horse and buggy to a deputy sheriff at Merrillville Tuesday evening imbibed too freely at some thirst parlor enroute and in stopping several people, among whom were Mike O'Hearn from here and young Granzow and young Buchfuehrer, nearly scared the lives out of the gentlemen. They fancied they were "held up" and so reported the incident but the deputy simply stopped the three different ones to learn the time of day, which was about 6:30 p.m.

I wonder if the Bandit of Joliet Road arrested himself when he found out who he was.

Friday, June 4, 2010

I must admit I never heard of Krit cars before I started reading these newspapers. A little Googling tells me the company operated only from 1909 to 1916. Check out that swastika logo.

From August 4, 1911.

Another kind of car I never heard of before. Apparently these cars were more high-end than, say, Fords. A little Googling again, and now I know the company operated between 1909 and 1918. Not long after this ad appeared, Hubert Bullock left Hobart; in partnership with Harry Dye, he purchased the Ed Wickamyer garage and machine shop on the "main street" of Valparaiso, and moved his family there to live and work. But he continued selling cars to Hobart-area customers.